There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

It is desire that engenders belief and if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with our own life.

People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.